Room5ians Rule! Mr Woody WAS their teacher. This is where they chat :-)
... and now that Mr Woody is pursuing other ventures, he gets to work with other schools too!

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Latest Clustermap

Any new countries? Check out the island north west of Great Britain... and I wonder why all the interest from Brazil? Maybe we should learn some Portugese. I remember people in Portugal didn't like it if we tried to speak Spanish to them when I was travelling there. Why do you think thy speak Portugese in Brasil?

Great to see more countries having a look in the great continent of Africa.

Clustermaps rule!

oh - today I learned what ellipses are. Can you spot one in this text? You will find out tomorrow.

10 comments:

The country north-west of Great Britain is ICELAND!!!!!Last week a earthquake hit the small country.My memory says it was 6.4 on the Richter Scale.I read that Spanish and/or Portugese explorers were the first to discover South America.I think thats how basically all the South American countries speak those countries.And no I do not think the Portugese will appreciate us speaking to them in Spanish!!!

The existence of Portuguese in Brazil is a legacy of Portuguese colonization of the Americas. The first wave of Portuguese-speaking immigrants settled in Brazil in the 16th century, yet the language was not widely used then. For a time Portuguese coexisted with Língua Geral, a lingua franca based on Amerindian languages that was used by the Jesuit missionaries; as well as with various African languages spoken by the hundreds of thousands of slaves brought to the country between the 17th and 19th centuries.By the end of the 18th century, however, Portuguese had affirmed itself as the national language. Under the Marquis of Pombal administration, Brazil started to use only Portuguese, for he prohibited the use of Nhengatu, or Lingua Franca.The aborted colonization attempts by the French in Rio de Janeiro in the 16th century and the Dutch in the Northeast in the 17th century had negligible effect on Portuguese. Even the substantial non-Portuguese-speaking immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th century — mostly from Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Lebanon — were linguistically integrated into the Portuguese-speaking majority within a couple of generations, except for some areas of the three southern states (in the case of Germans and Italians) and rural corners of São Paulo (Japanese).You can get more at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Portuguese#Portuguese_legacy.I agree with DH an elipse is the ....Mr. Woody speaking Spanish in Brazil is like speaking Italian in France, not very good.

Wait, wait, wait, I looked in my computer dictionary and it said:nouna regular oval shape, traced by a point moving in a plane so that the sum of it distances from two other points (the foci) is constant, or resulting when a cone is cut by an oblique plane that does not intersect the base.

ORIGIN late 17th cent.: via French from Latin ellipsis meaning - nounthe omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contexual clues.- a set of dots indicating such an omission.ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: Latin from Greek elleipsis, from elleipin 'leave out.'Is it me, or do those two definitions have nothing to do together.Also that means that the ... is right.

OOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I get it now.Thank you for clarifying that, I must of looked like an idiot.But interesting stuff and didn't you ask why they speak Portuguese in Brazil?I must be seeing things.Uh, what are you going to do?